Face to Face: ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 vs. NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI

Now that we have briefly introduced to you the major ATI and Nvidia chipsets for Socket AM2 platform, let’s compare their features and specifications side by side:

I would like to point out another curious thing that didn’t get into the table above. I am talking about the algorithms used to make several graphics cards work in SLI or CrossFire configurations. ATI and Nvidia use different approaches to the roles of the chipset North and South Bridges. As a result, Nvidia has two different chips responsible for the implementation of two PCI Express x16 busses, while in ATI’s solution the chipset North Bridge deal with both graphics busses.

In this case the solution from Canadian engineers seems to be more reasonable. The absence of any intermediate busses between the graphics cards ensures efficiency from the latency prospective.

And although Nvidia uses a high-speed HyperTransport bus to connect the chips with one another, it still increases the latency when the GPUs of different graphics cards communicate. Even LinkBoost technology that should speed up the connection between the SLI graphics cards cannot resolve this issue.

However, despite everything we have just mentioned, Nvidia nForce 590 SLI seems to be a more functional solution with richer features set. It means that in order to design a mainboard with the comparable set of features, the mainboard developer who has selected an ATI chipset will have to integrate more onboard controllers. But it shouldn’t affect the final price of the product. ATI offers its CrossFire Xpress 3200 at a slightly lower cost than Nvidia nForce 590 SLI, so the end-price of the ready solutions levels out. Both mainboards will be selling for over $150, and the price will mostly depend on the manufacturer’s ambitions and accessories bundle.